Happy Blogiversary to Me!

Today marks one year since I started this blog. A year ago I had just heard about the release two days earlier of WordPress 1.5, the WordPress version that really began to reach full stride. My friend Jen had been using WordPress for several months, and her blog was an inspiration to start my own.

My first entry was long and tedious. Like a number of my blog posts, it’s more of a reference for me than of interest to others. At the time I was hand-coding Perl as the back-end to several MySQL-powered sites, and not finding any other guide to highlighting text searches, I wrote my own.

At this point I get over three hundred unique IP address visits per day. Most of those seem to be interested in various of the WordPress plugins I’ve created. Usually the blog posts that attract the most attention surprise me. For example, I mentioned just briefly that I was fascinated by a new cooling technology most useful for third-world nations. Google the company that makes the product, Dissigno, and my blog entry appears second in the results, with the consequence that I occasionally receive emails from some confused people who think I am Dissigno.

One of the most popular entries is one of a photo of my wife’s Yoda origami. On average since I’ve made that post, every day and a half someone searches for “yoda origami” or some variant and lands on my blog, proving that no matter how obscure the interest, crowds of other people share it.

The lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has the distinction of being the #1 “Matt” according to Google. I can now claim the same of my screen name, “filosofo.” Hmm; think I can put that on my C.V.?